Posted
by
Unknown Lameron Wednesday May 14, 2014 @12:38PM
from the fifth-dimensional-hyper-worm dept.

KentuckyFC (1144503) writes "There is growing evidence that the center of the Milky Way contains a mysterious object some 4 million times more massive than the Sun. Many astronomers believe that this object, called Sagittarius A*, is a supermassive black hole that was crucial in the galaxy's birth and formation. The thinking is that about 100 million years after the Big Bang, this supermassive object attracted the gas and dust that eventually became the Milky Way. But there is a problem with this theory--100 million years is not long enough for a black hole to grow so big. The alternative explanation is that Sagittarius A* is a wormhole that connects the Milky Way to another region of the universe or even a another multiverse. Cosmologists have long known that wormholes could have formed in the instants after the Big Bang and that these objects would have been preserved during inflation to appear today as supermassive objects hidden behind an event horizon, like black holes. It's easy to imagine that it would be impossible to tell these objects apart. But astronomers have now worked out that wormholes are smaller than black holes and so bend light from an object orbiting close to them, such as a plasma cloud, in a unique way that reveals their presence. They've even simulated what such a wormhole will look like. No telescope is yet capable of resolving images like these but that is set to change too. An infrared instrument called GRAVITY is currently being prepared for the Very Large Telescope Interferometer in Chile and should be in a position to spot the signature of a wormhole, if it is there, in the next few years."

Except it's an important plot point that wormholes cannot stay open for more than 38 minutes, coincidentally the average show length. What happens when 2 conflicting plot points collide? Do plot and anti-plot annihilate each other?

The limitation in stargate was due to that energy: It accumulated. Pumping energy into the wormhole, it can't go anywhere, so the wormhole structure just gets more high-energy and harder to contain. Beyond 38 minutes the gate can't maintain stability, and even it if were possible the eventually closing of the wormhole would release all the energy accumulated within in a rather large explosion. One of the times the 38 minute rule was broken was through the use of a superweapon designed to do exactly that.

Given the intense environment around Sag A*, even if it turns out to be a wormhole it will be utterly non-traversable. However, there are hypotheses that wormholes to be stabilized require using negative matter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_mass [wikipedia.org]. At least, that's the most plausible mechanism suggested- so this would be inadvertent evidence that negative matter exists, which would be a really big deal. There's also speculation that a cosmic string could do something similar- note that a cosmic string is topological defect in space time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_string [wikipedia.org]- these are not the strings from string theory although many forms of string theory would predict that such objects would exist. And of course, if wormholes exist in nature there's some small chance we can either make our own o find much smaller ones and put them to use. Unfortunately, there's a lot of dust and other debris between where we are and Sag A*, so even GRAVITY may have trouble getting enough resolution to figure this out.

However, there are hypotheses that wormholes to be stabilized require using negative matter

If Sag A* is a wormhole, and required stabilizing, then it would have destabilized long long time ago, since it has been constantly gobbling up regular matter (albeit infrequently lately).

I doubt anything could pass through a wormhole, since that would probably break causality or the laws of thermodynamics. Also, we should have detected stuff coming out of the other side (maybe not of this one, but there should be "exits" all over the universe).

If wormholes exist, my guess is they will be more like a pair of entangled black holes. They would look like normal black holes, until you did a careful statistical analysis of Hawking radiation of both.

Why? Is there one nearby that we can observe with our extremely primitive and limited technology? Would we know it if we saw it?

Yes, we would know if we saw it. Essentially it would look very close to a white hole http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_hole [wikipedia.org]. And we should expect that if wormhole entrances are common then by the Copernican principle we should see some exits near us. This is one of the major reasons to doubt this sort of thing. As to your question about other universes- GR is not really happy with wormholes going from universes to universes- no one has been able to get the math to work out in a reasonable fashion- there's

One possible solution is that our wormholes (if they exist) are actually "pre big bang events" for a whole new universe inside the wormhole, and that they actually contain an infinite volume. "White hole" stage happens at the big bang inside, and any subsequent mass energy that falls in from our side just becomes dark energy on their side, distributed everywhere.

It would be interesting to try to plot out how causality works over the bridge.

the way I envision it though (which is almost certainly wrong), is that time is more confined (slower) near the bridge, but becomes less confined (faster) as the space on the other side expands in volume. (Speed is measured as 'planc seconds against unit of spacetime traversed by photon in vacuum' EG, near the bridge, photons appear to travel more slowly, where away from the bridge, they appear to travel more quickly. The actual energy of the photon has not changed, but the ratio between space and time has changed. There is more 'time' near the bridge than there is space, and vise versa further away.)Any particular "moment" can be seen as a topological point on the 'surface' of the wormhole.

(See for instance this image of the standard inflation model of our universe.)

If you cross your eyes when you look at it, the model resembles a white hole, where the "hole" is the big bang, the energy was delivered "all at once", and what we percieve as time is just a manifestation of the energy delivered. (it would explain why time runs only in one direciton, and a number of other interesting things. it could theoretically explain dark energy, etc.)

Another interesting tidbit: Supermassive objects like sagitarius A have a hard time "feeding". This may account for the inflationary curvature of our own universe if you, again, cross your eyes when you look at it.

EG, early in the universe, mass energy from the higher up one was spilling into ours. (their "hole" was feeding), but as it grew in intensity, the curvature on their end made such feeding more difficult, and the rate of influx slowed sharply-- ending the rapid expansion period.

If that's the case, then some corollary math should add up against observational metrics against black hole feeding on our side, and may give some interesting insights.

Can any of the more physics-head types see if there is a correlation between the estimated energy of the universe at the end of the hyper-expansionary epoch, and the event horizon size of these super massive black holes that can no longer feed?

In general relativity, wormholes *do* require negative mass (or energy density), for sure. Outside the context of the Casimir effect [wikipedia.org], negative mass in wormholes and warp drives can yield causality violations [wikipedia.org]. Causality is the last thing you'll pry from a physicist's cold, dead hands. Therefore, while it may be fun to speculate about such things, they lie squarely within the realm of science fiction for now.

To post on a news site that the galactic black hole "may be a wormhole" is like posting a headline saying that extraterrestrial aliens "may currently be among us." Both ideas are exciting. Both ideas are remotely within the realm of possibility. And both are so unlikely that they would readily be dismissed by all except those who are credulous or who like to drum up sensationalism for its own sake.

Why do you assume the environment is extreme? From TFA Sagitarius A* is estimated to have an effective mass of 4 million times larger than the sun, in a volume not much larger than the solar system. Which is a bit vague, but if we call it the radius of Neptune's orbit that makes for 4e9 solar masses within 34e9 solar volumes. Since stars are estimated at ~1.4g.cm^3 that whole space could be filled with pseudo-matter only 16% as dense as water. We assume it's actually much denser, with the associated far

The main way we've detect Sag A* is its massive radiation profile. That's a completely distinct issue from the issue of mass. But even the mass thing is a problem saying maybe it is filled with some sort of pseudo-matter is even more speculative than speculating it might be wormhole. And even if that is the case, the gamma and x-rays would still fry anything that got near.

Well, radiation is easy to deal with - nothing approaching at high speed behind a few miles of lead shielding won't solve. Gravitational gradients though... those could present a real problem.

I agree my pseudo-mass is wildly speculative, but a wormhole mouth that size would have a very similar effect - once you get past the mouth the gravitational gradient (potentially) disappears. And taking Neptune's orbital parameters as a reference (gravitational acceleration by the sun = 0.0000065 m/s^2), then if the central effective mass were 4,000,000x greater that would still be only 26.2 m/s^2, or about 2.6Gs, and the tidal forces even over a kilometer would be about 4 parts in ten billion. Even if the mouth were only the size of the sun so that we're talking an acceleration of 27million Gs, the tidal differences over a distance of 10 meters (plenty large for a small craft) would be only about 4Gs - well within the realm of mechanical engineering. And assuming passengers were curled up within little 1 meter balls they would be subjected to only one-tenth that - less than they'd experience in psuedo-tidal forces if splayed out on a children's merry-go-round.

It is interesting that so many call this 'pseudo science.' Black holes fell out equations, and we really don't know if black holes exist or are at the center of galaxies. All we know is that if we assume black holes exists and are described as the math predicts, many things do fall into place consistent with these predictions.

But black holes have issues and have caused many more questions than answered. Some observations are consistent with the mathematics, but the math leads to some confusing conclusion

The point here is that the concept of a worm-hole has been theoretical and the domain of Sci-Fi. It is a huge event if we are able to verify. My guess is that the verification will have ramifications in the theoretical physics, simply because so much has been strictly theory.

I think this is more pie in the sky theory than anything. Based on what we do know already, worm holes likely do exist but they're sub-atomic and exists very very briefly. A wormhole the size of Sagittarius A* would require an entirely new form of physics to exist. Everything we think is true would have to be wrong. Which isn't impossible, just pretty unlikely. Blackholes that size do, however, fit within our models.

Actually, if you read TFA the theory is that this started out as one of those quantum wormholes that was caught in the inflationary period, which I suppose could cause it to scale radically though they don't mention any details as to how that would stabilize things. As a "shot in the dark" speculation - if inflationary energy had gotten inside the wormhole then the "tunnel" would likely inflate radically as well, with the resulting flood of space and energy within it preventing its collapse, and stretching

of course, we don't even know that black holes exist, quantum gravity might preclude it, or dense enough matter instead forms quark stars, q stars, preon star, etc. instead of black hole. Care should be taken to see if one of these alternatives to black holes can be detected by GRAVITY findings

we don't know wormholes exist, certain solutions to General Relativity have them but again we don't know if physically possible to form.

Yes, actually we do. We know that supermassive objects exist... we know that they can bend light, and we know that space can be bent to such a degree by such objects that any light which travels too close to it travels a curved path that never leaves a bounded region of space near the object that we refer to as an event horizon, creating a region in space that is basically just "black" as it appears from outside of that region, It obviously obscures anything behind it, while its gravity still bends light in visible ways beyond its event horizon, allowing us to identify it's mass, position, and event horizon size.

Here we have a whole huge paragraph full of fantasized bullshit whose only supporting documents are a speculative paper submitted to arXiv, and a brief regurgitation thereof on some arXiv blog.

You've just detailed why Slashdot submissions - unlike links posted as part of the discussions - don't display the name of the site any included link directs to. If it did, there would likely be 99% fewer clickthroughs.

While I largely agree with the sentiment, this story is not one of them.

There are peculiar solutions to the field equations of GR, including wormholes and black holes. Whether any of these solutions can be physically realized has been one of the most interesting questions in both observational and theoretical cosmology for decades. The possibility of detecting the difference between a supermassive black hole and a wormhole at the centre of the galaxy is definitely nerd-worthy, although I agree the hype is, uh, over-hyped.

Furthermore, these stories give lay-people a bit of insight into how science--which is the discipline of publicly testing ideas by systematic observation, controlled experiment and Bayesian inference--actually works.

Remember when the existence of black holes was still hotly debated, back in the '70's? Observations on an very small object with a mass of more than 1.4 solar masses (the theoretical upper limit for neutron stars) resulted in a general acceptance that it was a black hole, which likely therefore exist. But that conclusion was contingent on a lack of other plausible alternatives, and so is subject to modification as other alternatives become more plausible...

Remember when the existence of black holes was still hotly debated, back in the '70's? Observations on an very small object with a mass of more than 1.4 solar masses (the theoretical upper limit for neutron stars) resulted in a general acceptance that it was a black hole,

1.4 Msun is the maximum mass of a white dwarf not a neutron star.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... [wikipedia.org] It's therefore basically the _minimum_ mass of a neutron star.

To show that something is a black hole you have to show that it's more thanthe theoretical maximum mass of a neutron star which is higher. That's not very well determined but is something like 3 Msun.http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/d... [nasa.gov]

let me preface that i have loved astronomy and space my entire life, so no hate here...

my first wall poster when i was 8 was a map of the local group that i got out of a natgeo...this was 40 years ago and at the time i remember my mind utterly being blown by that map and the realization of how tiny i was.

my problem with modern cosmology is, however, the new trend that propose theories with no testable means of proving them. i understand that with cutting edge theory sometimes there may be a lag between the

This is really a problem of the "dark ages" - roughly, red shifts between 1400 and 14 (i.e., the period between just after the cosmic microwave background up to the earliest quasars and galaxies). At one end, there are no black holes, at the other, there are supermassive ones, what happens in between, we don't really know. My own personal guess is that this is a consequence of dark matter [pku.edu.cn], and thus wouldn't require worm-holes but, if we can test the wormhole hypothesis, we should. We know so little about the dark ages that IMHO no possibility should be ignored.

Finally a stable wormhole for our FTL travel needs. Now, since Sagitarius A is 26,000 lightyears away, all we need to do is build some sort of wormhole network to get us there, and then FTL travel will be ours!

I recommend that we gather up all the world's warrior mentality politicians who are always dragging people into wars and bullshit, put them in uniforms, and send them on a mission through the event horizon to determine if there's another world on the other side of the wormhole, or if they just get squished like bugs.

Somebody has to do it: solve the Schroedinger question. Is it a wormhole or a black hole? Or is it a quantum object that changes between the two randomly as you observe it?

"The thinking is that about 100 million years after the Big Bang, this supermassive object attracted the gas and dust that eventually became the Milky Way. But there is a problem with this theory--100 million years is not long enough for a black hole to grow so big. The alternative explanation is that Sagittarius A* is a wormhole..."

No, the widely accepted alternative (aka, the actual mainstream consensus) is that the supermassive black hole and the galaxy grew together, not that the black hole came first and was supermassive before the galaxy existed. This wormhole theory is an answer to a question no one is asking.

"Cosmologists have long known that wormholes could have formed in the instants after the Big Bang"

There's a statement of oblivious credulity! I prefer the version which runs thusly:

Gilgamesh had two such dreams, first of a shooting star ("a lump of Anu") which fell on him -- so heavy he could not lift nor move it. The land of Uruk encompassed it. The people thronged about it, and Gilgamesh embraced it like a wife. In the second dream Gilgamesh saw an axe fall over the assembly of Uruk, and he hugged it as if it were his wife, too. Puzzled as to their meaning, he went to his mother, the wise goddess Ninsun, who "untied the dreams." She told him that both the star of heaven and the axe were his companion who was coming. "This companion is powerful, has awesome strength, and is able to save a friend."

Everybody who's seen Star Trek V knows this. We also know Spock kills God with a phaser, in accordance with the prophecies of the ancients. Then, Kirk will explain to a Romulan and a Klingon how maybe God wasn't out there anywhere at all, maybe he's right here (beats his own chest), "In the Human heart." And the Romulan and Klingon nod, like Kirk has said something wise. Hard to believe NASA gave Shatner a medal.

If your stupidity and belief system requires you to attempt to destroy my way of life, then you are a threat to me.

The Christians who want to teach intelligent design, the Muslims who advocate Jihad, and the morons who fight against vaccination based on a discredited report, and those who think tax cuts for the rich and trickle down economics is real and effective... these people are all dangerous idiots who think their belief system trumps facts, that some how god is on their side, and that we should all adhere to the bullshit rules they believe in.

They are advocating for my destruction, so it's really only rational to advocate for theirs.

Many many Christians are no better than the Taliban in their desire to force the rest of us to follow their rules.

So, yeah, fuck the whole lot of them. Putting ignorance and stupidity on a podium is a sign of lunacy.

" The photographer who didn't want to work for a gay wedding, the baker who didn't want to make a cake for a gay wedding reception, the companies who don't want to pay for abortifacients; all examples of theists being made to break their own rules."

No, no they are not. They are cases of theists imposing their rules on others or punishing them for not following the theists rules. There is no religion I am aware of which forbids photographing or feeding gay people. There is also no religion which forbids providing healthcare. Following your own rules means deciding whether YOU are okay with yourself being gay, not your clients, not your children, not your hairdresser, you and you alone. The same with whether or not you are going to get an abortion or use contraception or take advantage of any other medical procedure.

Refusing services to others simply because their rules are different than yours and thus they are gay or opt for an abortion is imposing your rules on them. It's your place to support the idea that everyone gets to pick their own rules. It's not your place to provide or withdraw support based on which rules someone else follows. It's simply none of your business.

So apparently simply disagreeing with you is threatening to destroy your way of life?

I think somebody really needs an ice cream cone, a hug, time with a puppy, etc. It's not that bad, buddy. Even the Jihadists are really not likely ever to personally cause you harm. A little perspective here?

"Even the Jihadists are really not likely ever to personally cause you harm."

The day before 9/11 you likely would have said the same to everyone personally harmed in 9/11 or through the loss of someone in 9/11.

"So apparently simply disagreeing with you is threatening to destroy your way of life?"

I think he is pointing out that those who disagree on these particular topics (which for the most part are factually established and not really legitimately open to debate) are as a group taking action to impose their views on others or tangibly impede education and/or progress in our society. In some cases even reverse it.

You can certainly believe in A god (or many) and not deny science but if you believe in God and believe in science you've deluded yourself on one front or the other. There is quite a bit in your holy book that contradicts science. For that matter, the two creation accounts in the first book directly contradict each other on many points and both contradict very well established science and are incompatible with the existence of fossils you can see with your own eyes.Where theists get confused is they see th

"So, all you secular scientist are implicitly supporting Nazism, since you agree with its foundational premises."The Nazi party may have described itself in such a manner but it's foundational premises were not consistent with secular science.

"Whatever argument you use to explain why you are different than them, can also be used by any Christian to explain why they are different than radical fundamentalists."

On the contrary. Radical fundamentalists are generally the most consistent in holding to belief in C

Why do you think that having an absurd childish belief is simply disagreeing with his view, rather than seeing it as the deep ignorance that it is?
Religious idiocy wouldn't be a problem, but malicious people are able to use it to get rubes to vote for insane anti-social right-wing loonies.

What if powerful free-est of markets capitalism provably left, for every one person with a successful Einstein level of intellect, five equivalently smart who had to put aside their insights and education to focus on simply staying alive? How many years of progress would that waste?

The USSR went from barely out of feudal to space faring in under 50 years while defeating the Nazis at huge cost, putting up with a mad man at the helm and having to compete with a country that successfully stole most of a rich continent and came through 2 world wars with all its industry intact. China has also done quite well in advancing from feudalism.Most of the more pure capitalist countries in the Americas are also brutal regimes with extremes such as Haiti which makes Cuba look like a paradise.The mo

On a recent poll about 1/3 in the USA believe in a young earth (10,000 years or less) and do not believe in natural evolution[1]. About half of the Christian believe that Jesus will come back in the next 40 years[2]. This is pure asinine to any reasonable long term policy and if not tamed could very well doom us all, especially because those believes comes from a first world country, that is military and economically superior. In addition, you have millions of delusional Christians that think WWIII will speed up the second coming of Jesus[3][4].

Moreover, if being religious is deeply ignorant, you should be able to provide strong evidence against the existence of a God. Not just point to a lack of evidence you like, but evidence against it.

First, that proves for me your ignorance of logic. You demand to prove a negative, which is a logical fallacy. Second, absence of evidence is evidence for absence. For example, if I make the claim that I have a cat in my house and you come over and look everywhere for my cat and you don't find anything, that is strong evidence that I lied and that I have no cats. The same is for God or for gods.

Which is why many species evolved collaboration. Evolution doesn't always mean killing competitors. Some species(particularly humans) do extremely well by turning competitors into collaborators and developing mutually beneficial relationships.

Which is why many species evolved collaboration. Evolution doesn't always mean killing competitors. Some species(particularly humans) do extremely well by turning competitors into collaborators and developing mutually beneficial relationships.

Until the last human dies, the pig species will survive, because we like bacon.

Correct. Life is a battle, and it's survival of the fittest. You kill or be killed. This is not new; it's been going on for billions of years on this planet alone.

Obviously evolution doesn't work the way you think it does, or you wouldn't have been allowed to live, because "naive" doesn't even begin to describe your anonymously cowardly existence.

The word "survival" in evolution is A) referring to the species, not the individual, and B) is accomplished in many, many more ways than simple "kill or be killed". If that was not so, every butterfly would be a threat to your life.

Wormholes involve extreme curvature of space-time. That means a large amount of energy. Energy is equivalent to mass, via E=mc^2, so a wormhole will have a large effective mass. That much mass in a small volume means an event horizon.

I don't really understand why a wormhole would have a smaller event horizon though. Perhaps something to do with the mass distribution. In a wormhole the mass would all be at the centre. In a black hole that grew through accretion it would be distributed throughout the volume.

So it makes sense to me that a wormhole would have a massive gravitational field - as I understand it a wormhole is theorized to be a place where the fabric of spacetime gets "stretched into the 'distance'", not unlike what matter does, except that instead of having a giant mass at the center its linked to a similar spot somewhere else, so that the "tension" between the two interconnected regions of spacetime maintain the distortion rather than a large concentrati

A black holes event horizon is a consequence of its massive gravitational field, so if you get that a wormhole should also have a massive gravitational field than the event horizon would follow from that.

And from my understanding, it's not the event horizon they are saying is smaller in the wormhole, it is the wormhole itself. So I think it is something like a difference in the tidal force, a more concentrated source of a gravitational field would have a stronger tidal force which can be detected.

Is there any real evidence that a wormhole would actually pass anything to a remote location, or is that just a writers fantasy?
Usually travel does not include being disassembled to your constituent parts midway. OK. Call me a doubter!

Evidence? Umm... there is no evidence that wormholes exist at all. But, by definition, if they exist, they would move matter/energy from one point in the universe to another. Otherwise the phenomenon being observed is not a wormhole. The matter that makes up your body is universally fungible as energy. The universe does not care which form you take.

As Rob said, there's as yet no evidence that wormholes actually exist, but we've managed to mathematically describe several variations in the context of the General Relativity model of gravity, so to the best of our knowledge they *could* exist (also warp drives and time machines - just to keep things in perspective)

But if they did exist, then the second problem is that yes, pretty much everything would be torn apart while approaching due to the extreme tidal forces. It could still be useful for communicat